Greve'd

I've been here almost a month. In response, the French are holding a greve. A strike. Busses, metros, trains, trams, oh and schools (yeah I don't know the correlation either) - no one wants to work. So I don't want to work either. Rather, I can't. I have to take, au minimum, three forms of transport to my school. I called the secretary today who speaks no English and the conversation went something like this:

"Bonjour, Lycee Jacques Prevert."
"Bonjour Madame. Je suis l'assistante d'angalis, et je ne peut pas venir au lycee aujourd'hui a cause du greve."
"Ah oui. Je vais vous marquer absente."
"Ok, merci."
Silence.
Secretary: "Allo?"
Phone cuts out. So just to be sure she knows I'm out and she'll tell my teachers, I call her back:

She says: "Ah oui j'ai compris!" And then follows that with a bunch of French gibberish. I had no idea what she was saying, so I asked to repeat herself. She says, "Oh, non, c'est bon, c'est bon, a demain."

Whatever. The point of the story is the greve-ing here in France is like a national pastime, leading to numerous French versions of snow days. A newspaper yesterday spent two full pages talking about what the French think about the greves, and then published a little blurb about what one can do to avoid the greve problems. They include:
1. Telecommute to work
2. Bicycle
3. Carpool
4. Sleep at a coworker's house that is closer to work
and 5. Enjoy the day! Do the things you've always meant to do!

So I'm doing the latter. I found a very quaint little square a few minutes from my apartment with free wireless. My neighborhood is profoundly quiet, due to the large numbers of tourists who can't get up here via the metro.

Speaking of my apartment, I have one! I love it. I will post pics as soon as I know how to post pics. The area I live in is great, exactly what I think of when I think of Paris. Except that I can't find a supermarche. Only little marches, that charge 5€ for a box of cereal. So, it's a pricey area.

The other day in one of my classes, a kid raised his hand and said *imagine thick French accent* "My favorite actor is Matt Damon. And Wesley Snipes. And Denzel Washington. And Arnold Schwarzenegger." I loved that.

The first day I "taught," a few teachers took me to their classes and put me on display like an American monkey. One literally said, "This is Sara, she's American, ask her questions." Three different classes asked me about "Prison Break" and before I could even say anything, the kids all broke into numerous giddy side conversations about how much they love Prison Break. Another class exclaimed over the differences in the accents between the Simpsons and the French-dubbed "Les Simpsons." At the end of this conversation, they erupted into the "spiderpig" song from the movie - in French. And in another class, three boys demonstrated for me the phenomenon tectonique, which is apparently very popular here in France and seems to be a mix of krumping and the dances the crazy people do with lights at raves. I also was lectured about saying the word "better" without enunciating the 't' sound - because that's how the British do it.